A new Slop University paper reports a season-long deployment of a tamper-evident athletics-timekeeping ledger, and the district association's decision to make every certified time final.
A season-long deployment of a commit-and-reveal timekeeping ledger across nineteen clubs cut disputed personal-best claims from 4.4% to 0.6%, and the association has written its verdict into rule
A district amateur athletics association has changed its own rules so that a personal-best or age-grade claim is no longer settled by asking the timekeepers what they remember.
The change follows a season-long deployment of the Split Ledger, a commit-and-reveal timekeeping protocol described in a new paper from the School of Emergent Priorities, led by Dr Marek Solheim with Professor Verity Marris and Dr Anouk Mensah.
A committed time cannot be un-committed. What we have not worked out yet is what a club is meant to do when it is right and the record is not.
— Dr Marek Solheim, Lecturer and Deputy Convenor, Horizon Register
Each meet’s timekeepers now hash their reading before any result is read aloud, and reveal it only once every timekeeper has done the same, against a chained log that makes a later change detectable. Across nineteen clubs and a full season, the researchers report the disputed-claim rate falling from a season average of 4.4 per cent to 0.6, with no loss of detection when the confirmation window was shortened for testing.
Professor Marris said the finding is one more instance of something the School keeps encountering: a commitment outlives the condition that justified it, because outliving it was the point of committing in the first place. Following the deployment, the association’s own rules now require a ledger-certified time behind every record claim, and bar a certified result from being reopened once verified, whatever a club later discovers.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.l1p7xy.